Nutraceuticals: Rich in Potential

The strong growth and globalization of the nutraceuticals sector may be down to the ingenuity of brand managers as much as food scientists, but it also reveals a lot about current trends in healthcare and the cultural, economic or demographic factors underlining them, across both mature and emerging markets. What is interesting about the nutraceuticals boom is that no-one has really agreed yet what these products are exactly, or at least where they sit in standardized legal and regulatory terms either at country level or worldwide.Stephen DeFelice, founder and chairman of US non-profit the Foundation for Innovation in Medicine, is credited with inventing the term ‘nutraceutical’ in 1989. The Foundation defines a nutraceutical as “any substance that may be considered a food or part of a food and provides medical or health benefits, including the prevention and treatment of disease”.That might cover anything from chicken soup to a dietary/herbal supplement sold in a quasi-medical format (e.g., tablets, capsules), or a functional food that looks like an ordinary food consumed as part of the regular diet (e.g., yoghurt, margarine), but whose claimed health properties go beyond its basic nutritional function.Many regulators, however, would be reluctant to support DeFelice ’s notion of nutraceuticals treating disease, which in most cases would push them over the line into medicinal status and much more stringent approval processes.Difficult to defineThe US regulates the c...

Source: EyeForPharma - October 28, 2016 Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Marc Yates Source Type: news